Sky Screamers

Why,” inquired the Psalmist, “do the heathen rage?”
That’s a question to revisit, in every age.
If King David were to ask me that today,
I’d reply: “I suppose they did not get their way.”

Why do the coyotes howl at the moon?
Though it is a particularly soulful tune,
Those aren’t astronomers, out on the range.
They’re only scavengers, lamenting the mange.

Just so, as progressives shriek at the sky:
There’s nothing they hope to accomplish thereby.
Their latest “Talking Points” are just bestial screams . . .
Yet they’re making as much sense as ever. Sweet dreams!

***

On the one-year anniversary of the election of Donald Trump, the official media—bent and shaped according to his iron will and replacing our formerly free press—gloats openly over the arrests of the few remaining dissidents, by the regime’s jackbooted thugs . . .

Just kidding. On the one-year anniversary of the 2016 election, millions, or thousands, or at least scores of frustrated progressives, intend to scream loudly into what most of them believe to be an entirely indifferent sky. As they carry out this project, they will do it in safety—at least, in physical safety. They’ll expose themselves to derision, however, which many of them have been taught to equate with violence—so rather than the catharsis they seek, they may wind up feeling worse than ever.

“Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?” asks the first verse of the second Psalm. Then, a futile rebellion is described: “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, ‘Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.’ ”

What bands? What cords? Those who rage certainly feel constrained. They don’t see, as the American founders did, a set of rights endowed to human beings by their Creator—they see only limitations to their own powers, and that feels like an affront to them.

The 21st-century progressive, too, sees the very things which safeguard his rights—the Constitution, the rule of law, respecting the results of free and open elections, customary civility, conventional morality, and perhaps even the scientific method and simple arithmetic (particularly when the results don’t align perfectly with progressive preferences)—as unconscionable impositions. He sees “gender norms” as an imposition by society, and may think the biological sex of the body he was born into to have been an imposition by…somebody, though it’s not clear just who. Reality seems a straitjacket to him.

So he rages, in bitterness and futility—provoking divine derision as he does so (verse 4). If you listen closely, on November 8, beyond the progressive screams, you just might hear the echoes of divine laughter.